Tag: Firefox

The Multifox addon for Firefox is a unique solution to an old problem that some of us account gluttons sometimes have.

The problem: Logging into several accounts at the same website, at the same time.

I’ll grant you that this isn’t a problem for most people, but if you are one of the few who have multiple email accounts, Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts, or accounts at some other site, Multifox could be your new friend.

Here’s how it works, once it’s installed:

Right click on any browser link, and you’ll see a new action in the menu, Open Link in New Identity Profile.

The link will open in a new window, and you’ll be able to login in as you wish. As far as I know, there are no limitations, on the number of windows you can open this way.

You have Christmas-ified your blog, so why should your browser be any different? In keeping with the red, green and gold colors of the season, here are some Firefox themes that will make browsing in the month of December charming and delightful!

A cute and light Christmas theme, although it works best on Windows. However, it does not have support for Firefox 3.5, and users are clamoring for this support since this theme is really good. Check it out!

If you have multiple tabs open, it gets a little too boring with all the tabs being of same color and format. It also often becomes hard to distinguish which tab is active in just a glance.

To help Firefox users with this, there is an awesome add-on called FabTabs. FabTabs colors your tabs by fetching the color of the website open in that tab. For example, a tab with Yahoo! would be colored purple, a tab with Mashable will be colored blue and a tab with Techie-Buzz will be colored black.

FabTabs lets you adjust various settings including color strength, opacity and contrast. You can also choose to only color the active tab and use/remove a bevel like effect for the tabs. Another option is to color the horizontal line below the tabs.

Techie-Buzz Verdict:

FabTabs is a great tool to add colors to your browsing experience. With multiple tabs open, it becomes super easy to manage them with FabTabs. I simply wish they would add the capability to use customized colors.

Thanksgiving is just around the corner, so why not get into the mood early? Mozilla has added 52 Thanksgiving personas for Firefox, which you can easily add to the browser.

You will need to install the Personas extension before you can make use of the Thanksgiving themes. Once you do that, you will be able to change between different Thanksgiving themes without having to restart the browser.

There is often a need to copy text from a web page and even though Ctrl + C works wonders, it often includes unnecessary formatting like links, spaces and font sizes. For example, during writing articles I often have to copy quotations from a web page, but to get rid of the formatting, I have to first copy it in notepad and then copy it back again to where I want.

This is a hassle. Thankfully there is an add-on that can save us from this drill. The Copy Plain Text extension for Firefox removes all the layout and formatting when you copy text from a webpage. Once installed, the add-on will give you an option of copy as plain text when you right-click on a piece of text.

You can also customize the options for the add-on and select whether to trim spaces around text, remove extra spaces and/or remove extra empty lines.

Techie-Buzz Verdict:

Copy Plain Text is a wonderful text tool that can save you a lot of time when copying from a webpage. It takes less than a minute to install and the fact that it is such a light-weight yet value-adding add-on, makes it even better.

If you have used Firefox the Firefox 3.6 beta, you have probably noticed that Mozilla has introduced support for Windows 7 taskbar thumbnails. Firefox 3.6 allows you to directly select a tab from the taskbar. This is similar to how Internet Explorer 8 behaves in Windows 7. Some people love this behaviour while others find it annoying. I happen to belong to the latter group. I am a heavy multi-tasker and often have dozens of open tabs organised into multiple windows. Taskbar tab previews doesn’t make any distinction between tabs from different windows and is a major productivity bump.

If you find taskbar tab previews irritating, here is a quick way to get rid of them.

Today is Firefox’s 5th birthday and Mozilla is celebrating with its Light the World with Firefoxcampaign. Firefox 1.0 was released on 9 November 2004. It was a tiny browser which dared to dream big. And today, it is well on its way to realize its ambition. Firefox currently has more than 330 million users and is the second most popular browser (behind Microsoft Internet Explorer).

Mozilla communities are hosting parties all over the world to mark this occasion. As a part of the Light the World with Firefoxcampaign, they will be shining the Firefox logo from Tokyo to Rome, from Paris to San Francisco, and more. For information on the planned celebrations head over to www.spreadfirefox.com/5years/.

Firefox has certainly accomplished a lot. It has managed to snag nearly 25% market share, is available in more than 70 languages and has more than 70,000 extensions. Most importantly, it succeeded in breaking Microsoft’s slumber and forced them to improve Internet Explorer.

What about the next 5 years? Christopher Blizzard shared some of his ideas at hacks.mozilla.org:

We’ll continue to make competitive browser releases and improve people’s experiences on the web. We’ll continue to innovate on behalf of developers and bring those improvements to the standards space. And we’ll continue to grow our amazing global community of users, developers and activists.

Happy Birthday Firefox and thanks for promoting web standards and trying to fix the broken web.

The days of bland and useless new tab pages are long gone. Opera kick started the evolution of new tab pages by introducing Speed Dials and was soon followed by other browser manufacturers. Mozilla has been playing around with various concepts for a long time. However, they are yet to implement any of the proposed changes. In case you are tired of waiting, New Tab King extension for Firefox may be just the extension you need.

New Tab King is a powerhouse when it comes to features. Here are some of the stuff that New Tab King adds to your New Tab page:

Although New Tab King requires minimal intervention on your part to get started, it provides plenty of configuration options for the advanced user. You can create search and applications shortcuts, build website exclusion lists and even change the page background.

Techie Buzz Verdict

Safari may have a more glamorous new tab page, but New Tab King takes the crown for being the most useful one. The latest beta of New Tab King also adds an Opera like thumbnail mode along with a cool looking (but rather pointless) analytics mode. New Tab King converts Firefox’s bland New Tab page into an awesome start page. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Google Wave has been making quite a splash. Only time will tell if Wave really has what it takes to change the way we communicate. But, people are certainly anxious to try it out. Wave invitations have been in great demand ever since its launch. So, it’s no wonder that someone has already developed a Firefox extension for Wave.

Google Wave Add-on for Firefox is a simple extension, which automatically checks your Wave account at a specified interval of time and notifies you if there are any unread wavelets. It sits quietly in the right hand corner of Firefox’s status bar and displays the number of currently unread wavelets. You can also get a quick preview of unread wavelets by hovering the mouse pointer over the status bar icon.

Techie Buzz Verdict

One of the major complaints against Wave has been that it is incredibly heavy. Having Wave always open in a background tab is a prospect that most users don’t relish. Google Wave Notifier allows you to close Google Wave when not required without missing out on any of the action.

Opera has had the ability to lock tabs for a long time. Recently, Google Chrome added the option to Pin Tabs. And now you can do the same in Firefox, thanks to an extension called Pin Tab.

Pin Tab closely emulates Google Chrome’s implementation. Pinning a tab removes the close button and faviconizes it, i.e. page title is hidden. If you click on a link or type a URL in the awesome bar of a pinned tab, the requested page will be automatically opened in a new tab. You can also pin tabs by simply dragging them to the left of already pinned tabs.

Techie Buzz Verdict

The ability to lock tabs is one of the basic features Firefox should have out of the box. Pin Tab works mostly as advertised. The only problem I encountered while testing was that, pinned tabs weren’t automatically shifted to the left, as promised. However, bugs are to be expected, since Pin Tabs is currently an experimental add-on which is still in early phases of its development.